Thursday, September 10, 2009

I made a picture!

There is so much wrong with the Abrahamic creation myth, it's hard to know where to begin. But morally speaking, I've always been a fan of Ayn Rand's take on it:

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge — he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil — he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor — he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire — he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy — all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was — that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love — he was not man.

I disagree with Ayn Rand on a great many things, but this is not one of them. I mean, I could pick a few nits in this specific formulation, but the central idea - that Original Sin condemns humanity for being human, and terms "evil" the very things that make life worthwhile - is right the fuck on. The cited source for the above quote is a good read, maybe about a page long; if you're not already savvy, it's definitely worth a glance. Go! Read! Enjoy! Now if you'll excuse me, I have some very important sinning to do.

5 comments:

Great slogan but I'm not sure if I can forgive you for making me read something by Ayn Rand I agree with. Christ, Allowing me to keep my prejudices unchallenged I would argue is an extremely important part of being human and there are plenty who agree with me.

Heh, glad you approve; you should tell Ebonmuse, he came up with the slogan itself.

After some reflection, [tone="sarcasm"]I must say, I am truly sorry for exposing you to new facts. That was wrong of me. You already know what you believe, after all, and I shouldn't be confusing you with that pesky reality.[/tone] As a former Objectivist (what? I was an angsty teen once!), it's tough to not be able to completely renounce her. But then, I guess Hitler wore pants, and I haven't sworn off of those.

Welcome to the party, Eliza! And I'm glad you like the picture! "High-minded content, enthusiastically low production values" is the name of my game, so I hope I can continue to tickle your brain in the future.

G, I just read the comic you linked (I didn't see it was a link in the e-mail I got) - and that's fuckin' hilarious!

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I won National Novel Writing Month!

You can read The Quantum Mechanic: A Superhero Story of Ethic Contortions in its first draft form, starting here. Or you can click the picture below to buy the final draft, with the "un-deleted scenes" integrated into the main story, and additional content that does not appear in the online version:

About Me

I have studied philosophy, jurisprudence, and medicine, too; and worst of all, theology, with keen endeavor, through and through. Yet still I am, for all my lore, the wretched fool I was before. (Faust)